Forty Acres and a Mule

In a Jan. 15, 1865 letter from Savannah, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman reported to his wife, Ellen, that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton “has been here and is cured of that Negro nonsense” – namely, Stanton’s insistence that black regiments be included in his army, an idea Sherman steadfastly opposed. But if Sherman won that particular fight, he knew he faced a much larger challenge: his treatment of blacks during his triumphant campaign through Georgia.

Only two weeks earlier, Sherman had received a warning from Army Chief of Staff Henry Halleck. “While almost everyone is praising your march through Georgia,” Halleck wrote, “a certain class … says that you have manifested an almost criminal dislike of the negro, and that you are not willing to carry out the wishes of the government in regard to him.” Three days later, on Jan. 2, 1865, Salmon P. Chase, who had recently been confirmed Supreme Court chief justice, urged Sherman to do something to counteract his reputation for “harshness and severity” toward the freedmen that “causes worry to many.”

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A drawing of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and his troops on parade in Savannah, Ga., January 1865.Credit Library of Congress

“Uncle Billy,” as his troops affectionately called him, had never hidden his racial antipathies. In a July 1864 letter from Atlanta, he insisted that “a nigger is not a white man, and all the Psalm singing on earth won’t make him so.” Around the same time, Lincoln reminded Sherman that, the deployment of black troops “being a law, it must be treated as such by all of us.” He closed with the gentle question, “May I ask therefore that you will give your hearty cooperation?” The response was vintage Sherman. After reassurances of his “highest veneration for the law” and promises to “respect it always,” he reminded his commander in chief that he had more pressing matters at hand. “When I have taken Atlanta and can sit down in some peace,” Sherman promised, “I will convey by letter a fuller expression of my views.”

In light of his battlefield successes, Sherman’s recalcitrance might well have elicited little further response, were it not for an incident in early December 1864 at Ebenezer Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River about 20 miles from the Atlantic Coast. On Dec. 9, the 14,000 troops of the Union XIV Corps crossed the waterway on a pontoon bridge assembled by Yankee engineers. Behind them trailed hundreds of freedpeople who had attached themselves to the column. Before the former slaves also had a chance to cross, Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis, the Corps commander (and no relation to his near namesake, the Confederate president), ordered the bridge disassembled. Estimates of the number of freedmen, women and children behind the troops vary widely, from a few hundred to as many as 5,000, and Davis’s decision may well have been a premeditated move to rid his column of the camp followers.

In any case, mayhem ensued. Col. Charles D. Kerr of the 126th Illinois Cavalry witnessed “a scene the like of which I pray my eyes may never see again.” Desperate to keep up with the Union forces, men, women and children “rushed by the hundreds into the turbid stream, and many were drowned before our eyes.” The fate of those who remained on land, left without food or shelter, with vengeful Confederates nearby, “was scarcely to be preferred.” Kerr dismissed claims that the abandonment of the refugees was an act of military necessity occasioned by inadequate rations. “There was no necessity about it. … It was unjustifiable and perfidious.”

Some greeted Kerr’s report with skepticism, but he insisted that “no writer who was not upon the ground can gloss the matter over for me.” It remained for another Illinois soldier, Maj. James A. Connolly, to act on the matter. Two weeks after the incident he wrote a letter to his congressman, hoping to get the matter “before the Military Committee of the Senate.” Not surprisingly, Connolly’s letter found its way to a different forum — the newspapers — and on Jan. 9, 1865, Stanton arrived in Savannah to investigate.

Sherman later wrote that “Stanton inquired particularly about General Jeff. C. Davis who he said was a Democrat and hostile to the negro.” A meeting with Davis, during which he claimed that his actions had been motivated solely by military grounds — the need for the pontoons elsewhere — and Sherman’s own dismissal of the claims as “cock-and-bull” and “humbug,” only partially assuaged the secretary of war’s concerns. Stanton next asked Sherman to organize a meeting with leaders from Savannah’s black community.

Stanton and Sherman met with 20 men on the evening of Jan. 12. All were ministers or lay leaders from the city’s black churches, and 15 were former slaves. Stanton posed a dozen questions to the group. Asked to draw a distinction between slavery and freedom, 67-year-old Garrison Frazier, a former slave who had been selected to act as spokesman, responded, “Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent.” Freedom, he continued, “is taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.”

The best way the freedpeople could take care of themselves, Frazier responded to one question, was “to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor . . . [so] we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare” All but one of the group wanted to live separately from whites, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.”

Toward the meeting’s end, Stanton asked Sherman to leave the room, and then asked a final question about black Savannahians’ feelings about the general. If Stanton was expecting critical comments, he got a surprise. Sherman, reported Frazier, was “a man … [whose] conduct and deportment toward us characterized him as a friend and a gentleman. … We have confidence in Gen. Sherman,” he concluded, “and think that what concerns us could not be under better hands.”

A decade later, Stanton’s slight still rankled. “It certainly was a strange fact,” Sherman wrote in his “Memoirs,” that “the character of a general who had commanded a hundred thousand men in battle, had captured cities … and had just brought tens of thousands of freedmen to a place of security” should be called into question.

Sherman successfully resisted Stanton’s subsequent insistence that he bring black troops into his ranks. But what he did next was much more significant. On Jan. 16, he issued Special Field Orders No. 15. The order “reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States … the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida.” Subject to several bureaucratic strictures, “each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground … in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection, until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title.”

The order encouraged the enlistment of “young and able-bodied negroes” in the service of the United States, and guaranteed anyone enlisting the right to “locate his family in any one of the settlements at pleasure.” Finally, the order provided that “no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress.”

Stanton’s role in drafting the order remains a subject of debate. He certainly approved the final draft and previewed it with Maj. Gen. Rufus Saxton, the Union commander who would administer the land redistribution. Given his stance on racial matters, it is hard to attribute any motives beyond the utilitarian to Sherman, and Order No. 15 was truly a strategic masterstroke.

As one of the general’s less forgiving biographers writes, “With his order, Sherman had washed his hands of his ‘Negro problem,’ rid his army of any serious potential black content, purged his columns of large numbers of black camp followers, passed the unwanted blacks onto a man he despised, Saxton, and at the same time neutralized Republican criticism of his racial motives and practices.” With Saxton, whose abolitionist sympathies were well known, now in charge of the freedpeople who had proven such a burden, Sherman was free to do what he did best — fight — and he soon set out to carve a path of destruction through the Carolinas.

Special Order No. 15 would prove to be a hollow victory for the freedpeople and those supporting their efforts to establish a new life in freedom. It provided only possessory title to the lands in what came to be known as “Sherman’s Reservation”: the occupants could claim the fruits of their labor, but would not own the land outright unless granted title by the federal government. Nonetheless, blacks from Savannah and the surrounding regions quickly began to settle along the coast and islands. The Rev. Ulysses L. Houston, who had attended the Jan. 12 meeting, led a group of his congregants to the Island of Skidaway, near the mouth of the Savannah River. There 99 households drew lots for the plots carved out of 5,000 acres, and several acres were set aside for a school and church.

By June 1865, approximately 40,000 blacks had settled on 400,000 acres of land. Under Sherman’s orders, the Union army provided mules no longer fit for military use to work the land (although the army intended to reclaim the animals once they had recuperated). By the end of 1865 the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been established by Congress in March of that year, controlled 435,300 acres of land eligible for redistribution in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida.

The bureau’s control was illusory. By the fall of 1865, former owners of the Sherman Reservation acreage, armed with special pardons granted by President Andrew Johnson, began demanding its return. When Saxton resisted, Johnson fired him in January 1866 and instructed Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, to return the confiscated land – ideally, the president added, in a way that was mutually agreeable to the original owners and the freedpeople who had claimed it.

Such agreement, of course, proved impossible to reach. Those freedpeople continuing to occupy confiscated land were generally given a choice: sign work contracts, thereby accepting peonage, or leave. Most left, taking with them, if they were lucky, the crops they had planted in 1865. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau still controlled 223,600 acres at the start of 1866, that total shrank to just 75,329 acres, all but 650 of which were in South Carolina, within 18 months.

Even staunch Confederate sympathizers bridled at such injustice. When a federal soldier told Mrs. George J. Kolluck that ex-slaves would be forced to return to work for wages for their former owners, she answered, she reported to her son that she answered, “very quietly, ‘this is what your Government calls “Freedom”? The injustice to us in robbing us of our property does not begin to compare to the cruelty to the negro himself.’”

Sources: Stephen Ash, “The Black Experience in the Civil War South”; John G. Barrett, “Sherman’s March through the Carolinas”; William A. Byrne, “’Uncle Billy’ Sherman Comes to Town: The Free Winter of Black Savannah”; Douglas R. Egerton, “The Wars of Reconstruction: A Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era”; Michael Fellman, “Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman”; Charles Bracelen Flood, “Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War”; Steven Hahn, et al., eds., “Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867: Land and Labor, 1865”; M.A. De Wolfe Howe, ed., “Home letters of General Sherman”; Jacqueline Jones, “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War”; Lee Kennett, “Sherman: A Soldier’s Life”; John F. Marszalek, “Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order”; Robert L. O’Connell, “Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman”; Claude F. Oubre, “Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership”; Willie Lee Rose, “Rehearsals for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment”; Anne Sarah Rubin, “Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory”; William Tecumseh Sherman, “Memoirs”; George C. Westwood, “Sherman Marched — and Proclaimed ‘Land for the Landless’”; An Act to Establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees; Minutes of an Interview Between the Colored Ministers and Church Officers at Savannah with the Secretary of War and Major-Gen. Sherman; Special Field Orders, No. 15.

Rick Beard, an independent historian and exhibition curator, is the author, most recently, of “Black Soldiers in the Civil War” for the National Park Service.

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